


On the Edge of the Nest

by BrachaShakhor



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: AU, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, M/M, Rehab, TW: Drug Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 00:48:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1063688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrachaShakhor/pseuds/BrachaShakhor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martin Crieff, a heroin addict, meets a surly alcoholic pilot in rehab.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been reading fanfiction for seven or eight years, and I thought it was about time to release some of my own into the wild. Thank you to my dear friend and infuriating, amazing beta, the big meany cabbagesandkings, for fixing my poor tense and not ending our friendship when I accidentally use passive voice.

It started with a needle, although probably not the kind you’d expect.  
  
Well, Martin supposed that it really, truly started with the kind of needle you would expect, but in the narrative that his mind had created, it started, really started, with the tattoo artist’s needle.  
  
Martin was nineteen and nervous, his chest pressed against the tattoo artist’s chair. His boyfriend, usually so adept at missing dates and forgetting to keep his most passionately sworn promises, was there, holding his hand and smoking like a chimney. He was dashing in his leather jacket, and when he suggested the tattoo, Martin couldn’t say no. Which had brought them there. But his boyfriend was there, actually there.  
  
When the tattoo artist had pronounced him finished, Martin craned his neck in the mirror to see his back. Delicately outlined wings, set starkly against the paleness of his skin, sprawled across his back and arms. It was fitting, they’d decided, since he was taking his CPL the next day.  
  
(Everyone had joked, of course—look at Martin, being such a grownup—because he wouldn’t take a single hit that night knowing there’d be a drug test.)  
  
He’d studied for days.  
  
He knew he would pass.  
  
He failed.  
  
The very next day, he caught his boyfriend with that goody two shoes Johnny Daly from the posh side of town.  
  
Good thing he had good friends with good pills.  
  
He was a delinquent, after all. That’s the label they’d given him, given all of his friends. They were all too poor to be anything else. Martin was the only one who sought to escape that title. The others were happy as they were. And maybe they were smart to be satisfied. They knew delinquents didn’t get to be pilots so they had no breakable dreams.  
  
Two weeks after his first failure, he saw his ex and Johnny Daly while out clubbing with his mates. Shannon handed him a needle, the first real needle, and then he didn’t care anymore.  
  
Two months later, he failed for his second time and almost ODed. His friends, laughing, kept him alive.  
  
And then he was lost.  
  
He spent the next four years in hazes, in brief periods of sobriety that ended in failures, which in turn bring him crashing back down.  
  
He hid the track marks whenever he saw his father.  
  
One night, he ran out of money to pay his dealer.  
  
It’s the first time he kneels in an alley and leaves with a twenty, but it’s not the last.  
  
Finally, not long after Martin failed the sixth time and spent his twenty-third birthday in a dark room sharing needles with strangers, his brother, Simon, got sick of it. He threatened to have Martin arrested at first. Martin talked him out of it. Nobody would hire him if he had a record, he pleaded. So Simon had seen it fit to confine him here.  
  
St. Maximillian Rehabilitation Center.


	2. Chapter 1: The Gray Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin gets a rude awakening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy wow, thank you guys for the comments and kudos! I hope you like this chapter. Thank you to by ferocious goddess of a beta cabbagesandkings for being mean to me until my grammar is good and for fixing my line breaks.

Martin’s eyes opened slowly onto a gray room on a gray day. Well, perhaps the day wasn't so gray; it was hard to tell, really, from inside the gray building where he lived for now. Everything felt colorless there.  
  
“Oh good, you’re awake!” Bernice, the disgustingly cheerful morning nurse said to him, her voice sickeningly sing-song as he sat up. Ignoring her, he slid mechanically out of bed and walked across the cold floor of his room to the bathroom.  
  
He took a piss, then stared in the mirror while he brushed his teeth. Even he was gray. His pale skin had lost its rosy undertone at some point that Martin had long forgotten. In the harsh fluorescent light of the industrial bathroom, even his bright ginger curls and blue eyes looked washed out.  
  
He was gray. He was an out gray man, Martin thought with a wry half-snort.  
  
Martin turned off the tap with a shaking hand. Although the worst of his withdrawal symptoms had passed in his early weeks at St. Max’s, leftover tremors still shook him constantly. Martin feared that they would never go away, and then he’d be fucked, wouldn’t he? Nobody would hire a pilot with a tremor.  
  
There was only one thing that could take the tremor way, Martin thought. And that one thing was exactly what he was being denied. It was just a drug, but it could save him—didn’t they see that?  
  
He shuffled out of the bathroom. His shifty, crack-addict roommate had just gotten out of bed by the time he was half dressed.  
  
Bernice was still in the room.  
  
Getting dressed was one of the things Martin wasn’t allowed to do without supervision. Others included shaving, walking down hallways, eating, and going slowly out of his mind from the boredom and the wanting.  
  
Bernice walked them down to the gray cafeteria for breakfast. The oatmeal that even Martin, who had been raised on the cheapest slop that money could barely buy, refused to eat was gray. The apple he ate instead tasted gray, somehow.  
  
The routine at St. Max’s rarely changed. Martin sat at breakfast, casting his eyes around the room. He spotted several people in his therapy group, none of whom he knew even after weeks. He saw others getting up, being led by the orderlies out one of the gray-brown doors. Those people, Martin knew, had been there for a while, had graduated to later stages of the program with more privileges. Right now, for example, they were being led to their visitors.  
  
Visitors.  
  
Martin wasn’t allowed visitors.  
  
Martin couldn’t yet be trusted with visitors.  
  
Martin probably wouldn’t get visitors if he could have them.  
  
He chewed his apple angrily.  
  
-  
  
Not long after, Martin sat huddled in a threadbare armchair while his therapist talked at him.  
  
“In order to help you, I really need to get at the roots of your addiction. And in order to do that, you need to tell me.  
  
And in order to do that, you need to talk.  
  
Otherwise, we’re both wasting our time here. Do you understand that, Martin?”  
  
Martin remained silent, as he had in every therapy session, during every attempt at conversation, every slow, gray mealtime, every walk through gray hallways with gray men charged with keeping him from acting out, that had occurred during his stay.  
  
Instead, he clenched his fists. Not to show anger, not really.  
  
Just to stop the shaking for a second.  
  
-  
  
Martin stayed silent for group. He looked down. Not much changed at St. Max’s. Why bother looking up? There were a few new people in the group today. Martin didn’t bother examining them. They would either stay or pass through.  
  
So around the circle it went, people talking and yelling and sharing sob stories. Martin didn’t listen to any of it. He tuned it all out, staring at his shaking hands, trying to distract himself with wandering thoughts of 747s.  
  
He was in his usual trance, because this was the usual group session. People who outright didn’t care about him and a doctor who had to pretend and it was useless, it really was, and if he had some, if he had some, his hands would just stop shaking and-  
  
“I don’t know why I’m even here. I don’t have a problem and I never drink when I fly.”  
  
Martin’s head shot up like an engine turning on. “Fly?”  
  
Martin’s voice was rusty and scratched from disuse. The doctor gaped openly.  
  
It was Martin’s first word in over a month, and he couldn’t care because a new man was opening his mouth and talking with the smoothed, annoyed voice of the man who flew.  
  
“Yes, fly. I’m a pilot.” The man, the pilot, fixes him with a hard stare. He was attractive, about ten years older than Martin and miles taller, even while they were sitting down. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a dark expression on his handsome face.  
  
“A pilot,” Martin breathed.  
  
The group’s moderator, never one to miss an opportunity, jumped down Martin’s throat.  
  
“Martin! It’s a pleasure to finally hear your voice. Would you like to share?”  
  
“No.”  
  
Then Martin clammed up, stayed silent for the rest of the meeting.  
  
Watching, finally. Listening, finally.  
  
But only to the surly pilot.


	3. Chapter 2: The Porridge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody eats the porridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it took so long to get this next chapter up! Blame it on IB (I blame most of my problems on IB) and also my tendency towards procrastination. Thank you to my all-powerful and majestic beta, cabbagesandkings, known as Emrys to the druids, who YELLS AT ME IN CAPS LOCK WHEN I MAKE DUMB GRAMMAR CHOICES.

The world that Martin woke up in was slightly, vaguely different from the one he had woken up in the day before. At first, he couldn’t remember why. As his feet touched down on the cheap cold tile, he sorted through his murky thoughts. What was it that had the room looking so…well, still gray, the room was still gray, but with perhaps a hint, a promise of color? The thought struck him as Bernice, as stomach-churningly cheerful as ever, began to cluck away at his roommate, trying to get him out of bed.  
  
The pilot.  
  
Right.  
  
There was a pilot, an actual, certified pilot, at St. Max’s. Martin didn’t know his name—he had been too checked out during the man’s introduction to hear it—but he existed.  
  
Of course, Martin thought, trying to squash his excitement (because he was always disappointed when he got excited, disappointed by everything but one thing), he hadn’t seemed like he wanted to share the secrets of his profession with everybody who asked. The pilot seemed more like he wanted to set the whole group on fire with his eyes.  
  
But still. He was proof. Proof that somebody who landed themselves at St. Max’s could fly.  
  
-  
  
As soon as he was finished being marched to the cafeteria by the orderlies, Martin scanned the room for the pilot. Despite earnest efforts, he couldn’t spot the man in the small sea of careworn faces. Martin’s excitement faded. Really, he should have known better than to be excited.  
  
Deflated, Martin watched the world fade back to gray as he shuffled into line to collect his apple and refuse his porridge.  
  
He was so focused on his own misery, examining his apple like it contained the secret of life (or the answers to the CPL examination), that he didn’t notice he was walking into somebody until he was sprawled on the ground.  
  
“Get out of my way next time,” the man standing above said imperiously. Martin recognized the voice instantly, and scrambled clumsily to his feet.  
  
“You’re a pilot!” he said as he tossed his apple nervously back and forth, trying to hide how badly his hands were shaking.  
  
They man raised an eyebrow at this. In all of Martin’s excitement about his profession, he had forgotten how handsome the pilot was. It certainly didn’t help his nervousness.  
  
“Yes, I am a pilot. I said as much yesterday. And you must be a detective.” With that, the pilot brushed past Martin, on the way to a mostly-empty table. Surprised, Martin dropped his apple. After scooping it back up, he hurried after him, undeterred by the other man’s sarcasm.  
  
Martin sat himself down across from the pilot, who was stirring his porridge, looking displeased. He looked up and scowled as Martin sat. “What is it you want?” he asked, then took a half-hearted attempt at lifting the spoon to his mouth.  
  
“To be a pilot.”  
  
The pilot put his spoon back down (like he was going to eat that gray slop anyway) and rolled his eyes.  
  
“Um, I mean—not that—I,” Martin began to stammer, twisting his hands together where he’d hidden them in his lap. “I just, you know, I, I, I want to be a pilot, a captain, hopefully, but really, any, well, I’d just like to fly, and I know a fair bit about aviation, and I don’t think, I mean, I’m fairly sure that there’s no other pilot in this, you know, here, so, I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”  
  
Martin wanted to drop through the floor. He sounded ridiculous. This was the kind of thing he was talking about, the kind of thing they didn’t understand. He never stammered when he was high.  
  
The pilot was staring at him openly, looking faintly amused. “Right,” he said slowly. “Well, I think it’s always good when a pilot is as eloquent as you are. Really lets the passengers know they’re in capable hands.”  
  
Martin flushed red and clenched his fists briefly in his lap.  
“Are you certified?”  
  
Martin was startled. “Er…well, no, not yet.” He sighed. “Not for lack of trying,” he continued more quietly.  
  
The pilot gave a derisive snort. “Well, good luck getting certified in here, Captain.” His voice was dripping, practically oozing, with sarcasm, and he proceeded to poke again at the porridge, ignoring Martin.  
  
Martin had the feeling that he had been dismissed, like a little boy sent out of the headmaster’s office, but he refused to leave. For all his stammering, Martin could be as stubborn as all get-out; he had to be, he supposed. One had to be stubborn to maintain a drug habit and even more so to try for their CPL six times.  
  
After a few minutes of poking around the gray slop, never trying a bite, the pilot put down his spoon with an air of boredom and impatience. “You’re not going anywhere, are you, Captain?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Well then, sir.” He gave a self-satisfied smile at the nickname. “Fine.”  
  
He sat there for a second, tapping his fingers.  
  
“If you want to be a pilot so badly, ideally you wouldn’t be rotting in this wonderful hellhole. So, O Captain my Captain, what got you put in here in the first place?”  
  
Martin swallowed. “It’s not really a big deal. It’s not even a problem.”  
  
The pilot rolled his eyes. “Well, it must be. Everybody here is an addict.”  
  
Finally, Martin felt he had the upper hand in this slippery slope of a conversation. “’Everybody’ includes you.”  
  
The pilot shook his head, unaffected. “No, it doesn’t. I just enjoy a drink now and then, and everyone I know is paranoid. So, what was it for you? Are you an actual alcoholic? Did you parents fret about how much weed you smoked? Tell me, oh tragic sir, what was it?”  
  
Martin sighed. “Heroin.”  
  
Martin couldn’t help but feel satisfied about the shocked look on the pilot’s face. He replaced it with his usually smarmy expression a second later, but Martin had already still caught the change.  
  
“Well, well, well. What’s a pretty thing like you doing on a drug like that?” Martin blushed, then realized that—surprise!—the pilot was being sarcastic, which only made him blush harder.  
  
“Well, er, I mean…” Stammering again, he thought, as he casted about desperately for an answer.  
  
Suddenly, to his rare and impossible luck, the bell signifying the end of their short breakfast rang.  
  
The pilot raised his eyebrow as nurses and orderlies seemingly came from out of nowhere, collecting the groups of people they needed to bring to their different group and personal therapy sessions. “Saved by the bell.”  
  
He stood up from the bench and paused to glare briefly at the orderly rushing towards him.  
  
“Well, see you around, Captain… you know, in all of your elegant, poetic verse, you never happened to convey your name.”  
  
Martin bit his lip; the pilot’s eyes flickered downward for just a moment. “Um, Martin. Martin Crieff.”  
  
“Douglas Richardson.” He offered a hand for Martin to shake. Martin looked at it forebodingly for a second before standing up and giving the pilot—no, giving Douglas a brief handshake, pulling his hand back quickly like he’d touched something hot. He hoped that Douglas hadn’t noticed his hands shaking, but the slight widening of Douglas’ eyes told him otherwise.  
  
A bored looking orderly appeared at Martin’s elbow with a group of other charges.  
  
“Right, then. As I said, I’ll see you around...Sir.”  
  
Martin watched Douglas wade away into the small sea of addicts.


End file.
